


The Hanged Man

by busaikko



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: mcshep_match, M/M, Tarot, Video Game, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-08
Updated: 2008-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-09 16:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some games are best with two players. (pre-Sunday S3, no S4, S5 spoilers).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hanged Man

**Author's Note:**

> **Betas:** AC and LS and MN, who are angels.  
> Screencaps by <http://stargatesg1971.com/>.

> Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,  
> Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.  
> Les Sept Vieillards, Charles Baudelaire  
> 

  


* * *

  
_Would you please shut up? These nice people say it's fine. Totally safe, okay? So just let me play our new friends' Ancient arcade game—which is the kind of intercultural exchange I'm all for—and you'll be home in time for supper. . . ._

  


  
_No no, no no no, no no, look—that's not—yes, I do know what I'm doing, thank you. Stop touching him, what part of catatonic do you not understand? Just. Oh, for—shoo. Go on. Bye-bye. Amscray. There. Okay. Look, hand me the—_

  


  
First there was the siege of Atlantis, and then their tattered and battered return to Earth. At the end of the month, John wasn't beamed onto the Daedalus with the others being sent back to Atlantis, and no one besides Rodney thought that was strange. The command of an important military installation like Atlantis required someone with more rank and experience, Elizabeth said, not a mere major. Her voice was perfectly composed, but the torque to her lips suggested that she was parroting an opinion she did not agree with. Rodney inferred, from things said, that she'd had to fight for her own position; that she'd considered John an acceptable loss. Carson's eyes did the same thing Elizabeth's did, sliding off to the side, away from Rodney's. Rodney wondered what Faustian bargain _he'd_ made to be allowed to return to Atlantis.

Rodney felt the pleasant smugness of holding the moral high ground until he realised that it didn't necessarily say better things about him that no one had tried to prevent his return. It simply, he thought, dropping his head into his hands to block out the annihilation of Doranda, meant that he'd been bought a long time ago.

In the restructured Atlantis, Caldwell didn't head his own gate team. He liked to keep a strong military presence on Atlantis, and research with military applications was at a fever pitch. Sam Carter recruited Rodney's sister to work freelance. Lorne took John's place, but he usually didn't want Rodney on missions. He had acquired his own loyal second when he rescued Wraith runner Ronon, who was teaching him the tattoo art of a lost civilisation. Elizabeth and Teyla wove dazzling webs of diplomacy, cast wide over Pegasus and strong enough to hold IOA at bay. Ford crossed paths with the expedition like an ominous meteor, and Carson bred the fallout of Ford's madness, opening the Pandora's box of Ancient genetic manipulation. Rodney felt as if he was cohabiting with Jungian archetypes, and he really hated how unscientific that made his life.

Rodney had places he had to go to get away, up on isolated towers and turrets, where he could stare out and see only empty buildings and the endless empty ocean. He liked to look at the Pegasus stars, naked of constellations and myths, foretellers of no astrology, and forget that he was up to his neck in monsters, tricksters, heroes, and princesses. He needed to forget that since coming to Pegasus he had discovered all of these fairy-tale roles in himself.

He told Teyla that if he ever got in touch with his inner Great Cosmic Mother, she should hit him, hard, with sticks.

When Rodney upped his destructive power from a handful of planets to a whole other universe, divine providence smote him with himself. Rod was shocked that there was no Sheppard on Atlantis. He cornered Rodney and waved his arms at him, talking about this that and the other discovery made, about daring rescues and near-suicidal missions. He spoke with a fervour that suggested he really wanted to grab Rodney's head and bang it into the wall until Rodney went all the way to Earth and dragged John back physically.

"Like I'll be able to do that after we drain the ZPM sending _you_ home," Rodney said. Rod looked away and asked how John was doing. Rodney said what he knew, which wasn't much. Some top secret project in Edwards AFB (_Christ_, Rod said, paling and pacing), before that a posting somewhere in the Middle East, and in between several months when even Sam Carter hadn't known where he was.

"You know that Carson gave the patents for his gene therapy to the US military," Rod said. "Imagine a generation of war machines only controllable by Americans with the ATA gene. Are you the _only_ person on this Atlantis who didn't sell his soul to be here?"

_But I did,_ Rodney thought, _or at least I never questioned, and that's as bad. Worse._ He asked Rod about his Sheppard, and felt even more hollow. Sheppard, not Lorne, turned into a bug. Sheppard—not Rodney—found Ford and was with him when he died. Sheppard nixed the idea of genetic experimentation on the Wraith. Sheppard was killed by the Wraith.

"But the bastard turned right around and brought Sheppard back to life," Rod said, shaking his head in incomprehension, his mouth in a tight slant. "Sheppard said that made them brothers, but he—he's got this scar." Rod's fingers danced in the air over his chest, and Rodney could imagine it too vividly.

Rod seemed almost on the verge of slipping and revealing whatever he was hiding, and suddenly Rodney remembered things about John that he'd let himself forget. The wide smile, the rare genuine one, and John's pleasure in his own competence, and the way he let his hips roll low when he walked, as if unconsciously ducking, which suggested he wasn't comfortable with his height. His eyes had been a weird non-colour, Rodney remembered, and his hands had been quick and warm when he was worried, and all of a sudden Rodney knew that Rod was sleeping with the Sheppard from his own reality.

_Huh,_ Rodney thought, and then he remembered his Atlantis and—how had he forgotten?—John. Rodney was, he was sure, being played for a fool. He sent Rod back, _thank you, message received, loud and clear,_ and hoped he wouldn't hear from his superego ever again. He played on Jeannie's sisterly affections to browbeat her into completing the space-gate system, which was easy now that he _remembered_.

  


  
Rodney thumped hard on the apartment door. After a minute, he kicked it for good measure. A minute after that, while he was wondering if he'd broken any toes, the door was yanked inwards, and John stared out at him. He looked. . . hardened by hurt, Rodney thought, his eyes bruise-dark and his bare feet looking terribly vulnerable on the dirty linoleum. He was holding a gun tightly in his right hand; he used it to wave Rodney in, as if he'd forgotten that he was holding it.

The room had a faded mattress under the window, a table, and a chair. On the table, neatly arranged, were six empty beer bottles, John's dogtags, and a pair of bantos sticks. John thunked the gun down on the fourth side of the table and crossed his arms, giving Rodney a significant look.

"I stole a puddlejumper," Rodney blurted out. He pointed back towards the door. "You don't really want to stay here, do you? The [Bekie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Beichan) in the dungeon décor doesn't strike me as very _you_." John was still staring. Rodney resisted the urge to thump his head like a fuzzy coconut. He snapped his fingers. "This is a rescue, get with the program."

John's eyebrows went up, and suddenly he looked very, very amused. "How the hell did you get here?"

Rodney made a gesture that was meant to be grand and sweeping and also impatiently dismissive. "Built a space bridge, hacked the SGC, googled your address, why aren't you _moving_?"

"Cool," John said. He scooped up the backpack that was under the table, swept all the snacks from the kitchenette into it along with the gun and the sticks, and slung it over his shoulder. Rodney was about to remind him to put on shoes, but as John walked out the door Rodney noticed he already had his boots on—unlaced, yes, but at least the effort had been made.

If Rodney were the sort to anthropomorphize, he would have said that the jumper was overjoyed to see John. It practically purred as he pulled them up into the Colorado sky. Rodney told John that the way he touched the controls was indecent and ought to be made illegal. John tossed him a bag of Doritos with a sideways grin.

Rodney's hack got them in the backdoor to the SGC, and they were through the Stargate before the iris was back online. Rodney munched contentedly as the wormholes whipped by. When they reached the site of the Midway station, John held out a hand, and Rodney grudgingly gave up the last chip.

"You're a sweetheart," John said, still chewing, and stretched over quickly to wipe his fingers off on Rodney's shirt.

"Oh, that's nice," Rodney said. "Not to mention mature. Of course, I hardly expected gratitude, and you should try the DHD now."

John punched in the address for Atlantis. "I'm plenty grateful." He propped a knee up against the control panel and eyed Rodney warily. "Confused, but grateful."

"Good," Rodney said, and nodded. "I was missing you for the longest time, and I didn't even realise that that was what I was doing. When we get back, you can explain this to me. I never meant to—to _cathect_ you. It's disturbing."

John looked alarmed. "I can see that," he offered, and called up the status module on the HUD so that he'd have something to squint at instead of trying not to look at Rodney. "You figure we get out of this game when we reach Atlantis?"

"Um." Rodney tied the chip bag into a knot and tried to toss it into John's backpack. It bounced off and spilled orange crumbs on the jumper floor. "Maybe?"

The jumper slipped through the last gate and slowed with preternatural speed to a complete stop. There was a disorienting pause, in which time the sense of absolute wrongness spiked sharply.

"Shit," John said, and continued to swear under his breath as soldiers in snappy white leisure suits rocked the jumper with energy weapon fire.

"Why are we on replicator world?" Rodney asked, frantically wiring his tablet to interface with the jumper's crystals. "This sucks. Do you know how much this sucks?" John didn't say anything, but the jumper punched out through a glorious stained glass-like-polymer window, dropping and twisting and _there_, Rodney was into the Asuran's systems. "Oh, left, left left left, under that—yes and—no, what, are you trying to _use the Force_?"

The jumper banked, slipped down less than half a metre away from the side of a skyscraper, and settled, gentle as a leaf, on a bit of art-deco-ish decoration. Overhead, formations of sleek gold ships flitted by.

Rodney watched the data scrolling by on his tablet with a sinking sense of horror. "They're backtracking us—mining the gate for the address we dialed in from. Once they get that, they get the next, and the next, and—crap, we'll have led them right to Earth." He switched the display to the HUD. The Asurans already had the first four symbols.

"So tell me what we're supposed to do," John said.

Rodney huffed. "Look, I've done my rescue for today, I am all out of brilliant rescues."

John grunted. "So rescues are sold out today. We can do without." He cocked his head at Rodney, almost apologetically. "It kind of seems like a rotten way to express my gratitude, though." He slapped the jumper's cloak on and pulled them airborne again.

"We're going to be too late," Rodney said. "Just one more symbol—no, crap, they're dialing."

"The fuck they are," John whipped back, moving the jumper with the full force of his anger. Rodney gripped his seat with white-knuckled hands: the inertial dampeners didn't make the input from his eyes any less terrifying. For some reason, John seemed to think that upside-down was the most expedient way to fly—and, okay, it made sense if John's plan was to punch drones into the underside of the gate room. A large portion of the side of the tower exploded outwards. Rodney could see the gate shining blue through the dust and debris. It rolled—fell—out of the tower and spun down towards the sea below. The wormhole was still established: Rodney wondered madly if it had originally been a space gate, or if all of them were this sturdy.

The jumper screamed down.

Rodney thought idly of pointing out that the chance of their making it through the gate was as good as that of threading a needle in a hurricane. But he assumed they were going to die. John might as well go out having fun.

John made a stupid cowboy noise—_whoo-hoo_—and jerked the jumper down under the falling-spinning gate and then straight up. There was a loud rending noise—the right nacelle, Rodney thought with a wince, scraping against the inner edge of the gate—and then they were through. Rodney craned his neck to watch the gate fall, wormhole extinguished, and snap in two on a seawall, the pieces boomeranging into the ocean.

"Well, shit," John said, making swift sure corrections to the controls. The jumper was pulling hard, down and to the left. "Plan B, up and out."

"You said _whoo-hoo_," Rodney accused, as they shot through the clouds, up through the atmosphere, and out in a wide drunken arc towards the Asuran asteroid belt.

"Yippi-ki-yi-yay," John muttered grimly, trying to read the environmentals and avoid asteroids at the same time. "And also yee-haw."

Rodney flinched as an asteroid whuffed into them, changing their course straight into another asteroid. That one smashed into them with a force that Rodney was sure had loosened all his fillings. They took three more hard hits before the puddlejumper gave up the will to fight. The HUD blinked out in apologetic static; the blue emergency lights made everything seem suddenly colder. John yanked his hands off the controls as if they burned. Rodney took a deep breath.

"Well," he started, and John gave him a look that he couldn't see clearly but might have been regret. "No, no, _that's_ how it _should_ be done! God. I missed this. Saving the world with nano-seconds to spare. I missed doing this with you."

John hunched. "We're going to die out here, you know. Everything's unresponsive. We're just drifting. And I think we're leaking atmosphere."

Rodney shrugged his own shoulders loose. "There's no one in the universe I'd rather drift to my death with, John, and I mean that in the nicest possible way."

John didn't say anything for a moment, then looked at Rodney with a flash of teeth. "Elizabeth dropped you on your head, didn't she?"

"I thought about you every day. It just took me a while to realise it. I should have rescued you a long time ago."

John was definitely grinning now. "Too bad we're in a horror movie instead of a romance. Otherwise, there'd be desperate kissing round about now."

Rodney didn't even need to think about that. "_This_ is pure space opera. And at this point—bad guys routed, good guys victorious, princess rescued—there definitely should be kissing." Rodney held out a hand. "Come here."

John allowed himself to be pulled over. His palms were damp; Rodney shifted his grip to John's wrist and felt the race of his pulse. John curled his other hand around Rodney's jaw. "You do realise we're going to asphyxiate on our first date."

"It's happened before," Rodney said darkly; expensive restaurants did tend to put lemon in the water. He arranged John where he wanted him, straddling him.

The kissing was slow and meandering, hello and goodbye all tangled up with regret and pleasure. The end when it came was no more insidious than sleep, John's head coming to rest on Rodney's shoulder and Rodney's hand slipping free of John's hair and falling into darkness.

  


They died and they woke, having been gone just long enough for observers to grow bored and the crowd around them to thin. Rodney's eyes snapped open as he fell back away from the game console, and he twisted around in fear, but John was right beside him, blinking. Rodney glared.

"I suppose that's your idea of a happy ending, then?" Rodney said. "Jolly."

John shrugged, looking away, and Rodney didn't have anything to say to that. They let Teyla recite all the ritual words necessary to get them away as quickly as was socially possible. Rodney really wasn't up to making _thank you, it's been lovely_ noises.

Carson found nothing wrong with them, because there was nothing wrong.

Rodney went to his room and took a shower. He was about to go seek John out when John came to his door, his own hair towel-tousled and his face scrubbed pink. John didn't say anything, just inclined his head, and Rodney fell into step behind him, to the transporter, up several flights of unfamiliar stairs, and out to the crown of the high east tower.

"It's like the whole planet's turning around us," Rodney said, feeling his face stretched by sheer childish glee. He held his arms out wide, fingers spread. The wind whipped at his hair. John laughed, threw his head back and cackled, and then grabbed Rodney and pulled him awkwardly around in a circle as if he were a completely insane person. The sun sparkled down like gold, the clouds were wispy grey, and heavy fat snowflakes made a drunken paisley out of the air.

"I'm the king of the world," John shouted at the sky. The sky, vast and unending and dwarfing John and the city, pushed the words echoing down against walls and spires and towers. John's voice bounced, faded, and was gone.

Snow fell. The world spun, and pulled the sky along with it. John's arms stayed where they were, around Rodney. His head settled, soft and heavy like snow, on Rodney's shoulder, his face turned so his breath warmed Rodney's neck, his mouth curling into a smile against Rodney's skin, and after a moment Rodney held him back.

:. :. :. :. :.  
end  
.: .: .: .: .:  


> Teeming, swarming city, city full of dreams,  
> Where specters in broad day accost the passer-by!  
> The Seven Old Men, Charles Baudelaire  
> 

  


  


* * *

**Author's Note:**

> While you might think of [Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer](http://www.archive.org/details/EddieCantorwithCookieFairchildandtheTreasuryOrchestra) (_warning: external link; racist language_) as the definitive song for the prompt, it reminded me of the theme to The Greatest American Hero ([Believe It or Not](http://www.sendspace.com/file/9yfap0)), about an ordinary man who is forced to be a hero and succeeds beyond his own expectations.
> 
> A Stargate card spread can be found [here](http://i349.photobucket.com/albums/q386/sga_tarot/stargatespread.jpg).


End file.
